But the moral outrage at the wastefulness of planned obsolescence in the 1950s and 1960s did not just reflect a general revulsion at ineficient use of resources but reflected also an interpretation of planned obsolescence as a concerted attack by big business on the purchasing power of the wage—causing wage earners to, in efect, get an insuficient return for their labor. The duty of business, in the mass consumer economy, to provide consumers with reasonable and fair durations of use in the commodities sold to them, was of a piece with the obligation of business to share the benefits of increasing productivity with its workforce. In reneging on its obligation to consumers, by employing planned obsolescence, and thereby in efect diminishing the purchasing power of the wage, big business reneged on its obligation to reward workers for their contribution to increasing productivity, by increasing real wages.
When, in the early 1970s, planned obsolescence was taken up in the context of concerns about the environment, waste changed from being the product of a counterfactual calculation—of how much more use value could have been realized in the design of a given product—to being an actual substance, a toxic excrescence of industrial society. Waste went from being an abstraction, based on unrealized potential use value, tied to the technocratic pursuit of optimal eficiency and to the ethics of fair economic exchange, to being a material efluence, a physical impinging of society on nature, and a collective sin for which every member of society bears some responsibility. Within the critical discourse about planned obsolescence, the objective of waste reduction therefore changed from the maximization of the use value in commodities to the minimization of environmentally damaging negative externalities.
- Obsolescence Obsolete?
Just as the environmental critique of planned obsolescence was gathering force, the paradigmatic form of planned obsolescence—style obsolescence in the auto industry—began to wane. The move away from the rather rigid policy of annually revamping automobile models was driven in part by largescale economic changes that caused a slow-down in the rate of productivity improvement, and a consequent squeeze on profit (Glyn 1991, 2006). The result was that less capital was available for the costly retooling required for yearly model changes. Special tooling costs were estimated to have amounted to \$100 million dollars between 1964 and 1965 for Ford alone. By the early 1970s, yearly changes of model had become prohibitively expensive for car manufacturers.
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Time for Things